The Cross-Generational Appeal of Gottscheer Hall

On the first evening of fall, members of the boomer-era Ridgewood diaspora, fresh from Florida and Long Island, gathered at Gottscheer Hall to reminisce about adolescence. “We used to rip the antennas off cars and go fight each other,” a woman said, as a bearded man listed bygone rival gangs—the Halsey Bops, the Bleeker Boys—that had prowled the old neighborhood, then an insular enclave of German-speaking immigrants. “But now we’re all friends,” she added. In the faux-Tudor barroom, a man studied a map of Gottschee, part of modern-day Slovenia, near Melania Trump’s birthplace. The garrulous bon vivant of the clan—“the only Sanders voter here”—offered a pink vape, a stein of Spaten, and stories from his life (jail time for armed robbery, service in Vietnam, a turn as a playwright) to a thirtyish filmmaker eating bratwurst. “He keeps calling us millenniums,” the filmmaker whispered to her partner, a Swedish sculptor. A week later, the boomers were gone, a quinceañera raged in the back, and a sampling of the mid-twenties, M-train art set streamed in. Two curators compared tasting notes on Killepitsch liqueur (“children’s Motrin”), grapefruit Schöfferhofer beer (“undertones of Fanta”), and Underberg digestif (“I wish this on my enemy”). In the entry hall, preteens in pink tulle darted past a group of artists gazing at portraits of women in blue-and-white sashes—recipients of the Miss Gottschee crown, appointed at the annual Gottscheer Volksfest, on Long Island—as someone ordered an Uber to the next party, in Bushwick. As they departed, the security guard called out, “You just missed Dorothy!”—Miss Gottschee ’11—“But don’t worry. She’ll be back.” (657 Fairview Ave., Queens. 718-366-3030.) ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the October 15, 2018, issue, with the headline “Gottscheer Hall.”